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July, 2026: “Oysters please!” Nigel Farage chirped in the garden of a seafood restaurant somewhere near Clacton-on-Sea. One has to wonder how many times he’s said those exact words in his 62 years – more than a few dozen, I suspect. A man’s proximity to the British right is almost perfectly correlated to his affection for crustaceans, mollusks and flaky fish. 

He should have known, then, that there were interlopers in his ranks. In Reform: Exposed by Channel 4 and Verbatim Farage is caught on hidden camera merrily cavorting with fake American donors over white wine (screw top) and oysters in the constituency. Party conference? Derailed. Scandals? Piling up. Reform? Exposed? Sure, maybe! But he should have seen it coming – with that one simple slip in the semantics. 

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